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December 9, 2003

I really should have done another update sooner than this – sorry about that So what’s happening? Well, I have fixed almost all of the known bugs in the current Blog 8.0 beta but am kind of stuck on moving forward :p How come? Both because of work and because I’m doing several external projects for various people … in addition to working on a Java collaboration application which uses the JXTA framework :p Let me get to all of that in a minute but first about Blog – I’ll probably release the latest build of Blog 8.0 beta today or within the next few days since it seems to work fine … at least for me. Once I get my current lot of other stuff done, I’ll get back to reworking Blog … but of course, by then, I’ll probably have a new set of bugs to fix based on the latest release :p

Now about the other stuff – most of it is fairly innocuous stuff anyway and not worth mentioning but I’m kinda pumped up about the collaboration app It all started because I got involved in a project at work which deal with Groove. Groove is a collaboration app which allows multiple people to work in collaboration in what they call a "shared space". The problem with Groove is that it’s a resource hog and needs a machine with 256MB+ RAM and while that is not a problem in the rest of the world, in Sri Lanka where most machines are still probably at the Pentium stage with 32-64MB of RAM, it can be a major problem. The people at work are going ahead with the Groove related project because they have their own reasons to do so. But the more I worked with Groove, the more I became convinced that there must be an easier way to do what they are doing on less resources and on more hardware platforms since Groove is limited to running on Windows based operating systems.

Java seemed the best route to go since it would allow portability and the ability to run on quite a few different platforms and then I stumbled across the JXTA project which tries to provide a P2P (Peer-to-Peer) framework in Java. This seemed the ideal way to go since I was looking at a P2P app anyway and so was born a project that I’m calling Roomz. So far, I’ve gotten the UI and the basic framework in place and am now busy adding spare functionality. I try to work on Roomz whenever I have a spare moment and so, I really haven’t had much time for coding anything else But hopefully, I’ll get Roomz to an acceptable level soon and will be able to decide where I’m going to go with it and at that point, I should resume coding other stuff … Or at least, that’s the plan :p